Up In Our Bedroom After The War
by Renn Ireigh
Summary: Under a tree in his meadow, Rachel and Tobias talk about what life will be like when the war is over. Circa end of series, canon-compliant (alas!)


_Disclaimer_: I don't own it. If I did, it would have been like it was, only worse. The title of this piece comes from the Stars song "In Our Bedroom After The War."

_Timeline notes: _Falls somewhat generically in the ballpark of books 48 and 49, in the lead-up to things starting to hit the fan but before they actually do. I'm assuming a battle that didn't canonically exist, but we know there must have been plenty of those.

_Sidenote: _I am thoroughly sick of Ficnet screwing up my formatting, so if you want to see this look nicer, you can also find me on AO3.

**Up In Our Bedroom After The War**

Renn Ireigh

Rachel walked out of the barn with blood on her hands- literally and figuratively- midway through an argument with Jake. Some of the blood was hers and some of it was Ax's, but a little drama and a quick morph and demorph later, Ax was fine. Rachel was too tired to do the same.

That morning she'd told her mom that she'd spend the night at Cassie's, or at least she thought she had. She hoped she had, because the last thing Rachel needed was her mom calling the cops thinking she was a runaway after the day she'd had.

Halfway down the driveway, Rachel felt rather than heard Tobias flapping awkwardly towards her. It took exertion to stay low enough that they could have a comfortable conversation, but she wasn't far enough away from Cassie's house and everybody in it that she could risk stopping by a convenient tree to have a chat with a hawk.

So she said it aloud without turning to face him. "I'm tired. I'm dead tired. And I'm really, really hungry. Do you want a hamburger?"

(Are you okay?) he asked instead, then reconsidered. Sorry. Stupid question.

"Of course I'm okay. Ax nearly died and then tried to take my arm off while I tried to get him to hold still so Cassie could stitch him up while he regained the presence of mind to morph it all away. No problem, we got our butts kicked again fighting aliens, all in a day's work."

(You sound like Marco.)

"Low blow."

(Look, Jake didn't mean-)

"I know. I know he didn't mean what he said." And because it was Tobias, and _only_ because it was Tobias, she leaned against a tree, waited for him to perch in it, and said, "Some days I get tired of being ruthless and other days I get tired of being called on it. This is one of those days."

(One of which of the two?)

"Both." She jumped to catch Tobias's branch in her hands, then just let her body dangle, letting her spine stretch out. Being an elephant was all well and good, and particularly useful for carrying wounded aliens wrapped in her trunk out of a war zone, but the differences in spinal structure left her feeling hunched over. "I'm just tired. I'm really, really tired of all of this. I want to go home and go to sleep and wake up when this is all over. You know?"

(Yeah. Yeah, I get it.)

Rachel readjusted her grip on the branch so she could run one of her fingers up the back of Tobias's spindly leg, then looked into his hawk's eyes. "Yeah. I know. I think you get it more than anybody else."

She dropped back down to the ground. "Look, I'm ravenous. I haven't eaten since breakfast and that was approximately fifty dead aliens ago, so I'm going to ask you this as a personal favor. You don't have to come with me to actually pick it up 'cause I know you're just as tired as I am, but can we please do something normal and get McDonalds or something? And just eat it. Somewhere."

(Sure. Sure. No ketchup this time?)

"Sure. Can't have ketchup in your feathers. Meet at your place in half an hour?"

Tobias made a noise that might have been a snort, if he'd had the laryngeal structure. (Yeah. My place. Such as it is. Also, Rachel?)

"Yes?"

(You're covered in the blood of two species. Please take a shower before you get food anywhere.)

.

A shower would have required explaining to her mother where she'd been. She ended up walking through the drive-through, explaining to a cashier who was more bored than actually horrified that the red and blue liquids that had dried and now crusted her body were actually paint.

Gymnast, ex-straight-A-student, Animorph, phenomenally accomplished liar, potentially ruthless killer, and now artist. Good job, Rachel, she thought.

She took the long way back to the meadow, in case a girl strolling down the road in bloody spandex wearing dollar store flip-flops but carrying a Kate Spade purse with her two McDonalds bags would have attracted attention.

Rachel didn't see Tobias when she arrived, but she hadn't expected him to make the effort to leave his perch once he'd gotten comfortable in it. It had been a long day. "Delivery service," she announced.

(This is so much easier than rodents.)

"Probably not as healthy."

(Who cares? Hang on, I'm coming down.)

"Don't bother. I'm coming up."

(Holding the food? How's that going to work?)

Not at all, as it turned out, so Tobias fluttered down and rested on a root. Rachel sat down carefully next to him, close enough to touch her boyfriend but not so close that the hawk would panic. She'd learned the hard way that the hawk had personal space issues, particularly when he wasn't expecting human girls to put their hands on his crest.

(A morph and demorph later, the gouge in her hand had vanished, but Tobias- boy again- had taken a few weeks to talk out of his self-loathing.)

Halfway through her hamburger Rachel decided that she'd rather be the one to bring it up. "Do you ever think about what's going to happen after the war?"

(I try not to,) Tobias said, shredding pieces of meat. (We could all be dead.)

"Thanks for your optimism. I'm serious. What if we manage to live through this and we win? Do you ever think about what you'd do?"

Tobias didn't answer right away, so Rachel hurried on. "I mean, what would we do with ourselves? High school? College? Jobs? Do I put on my resume 'Saved the world at age whatever'?"

Tobias would have snorted, except… Except. (It would be different, that's for sure.)

"Yeah. I can't picture it. I don't know what I'd do with myself."

(Me neither.)

"Most days it seems like this is all there is."

(Yeah. Surviving. Fighting. Not dying.)

"Killing."

(Killing.)

"It's different for you, though, isn't it? Some of what you kill, you do to survive. The rest of us don't have that excuse."

(Sure you do. I kill mice to eat and live another day. We, all of us, kill Yeerks to save our species. That's survival. Personal and global.)

"Isn't that justifying it, though?"

(Sure it is, but what else can we do?)

Rachel looked down at him- at the by-now-totally-normal sight of a red-tailed hawk midway through a French fry. "That doesn't sound like you."

(What do you mean?)

"You usually aren't quite so… accepting."

(Yeah. I don't think I used to be. But it changes you, you know?)

"The war does, or being a hawk does?"

(Both. I'm just tired. I'm really tired.)

"Yeah. Me too."

(Everything's so different from the way it used to be, and if I stop to think about how crazy everything is, it's just… So I don't think about it. I think we have to look forward.)

"I don't know that I even want to see what's ahead of us."

(Yeah. Me neither. I just want the whole thing to be done, and us to win, and then…)

"Then what?" Rachel prompted him when he trailed off.

(What's going to happen with us, Rachel? When all this is over?)

There it was again, the elephant in the room when the elephant wasn't her.

"It's so easy for the others, isn't it?" she responded slowly. "Cassie and Jake. Easy. Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak even. They know who they are, they know what they are, and no matter what they know they're going to stick together if they all make it out of here."

(And we…)

"Are still going to stick together." Her voice was hard. "The rest of the pieces…"

(What are we going to do?) he repeated.

"I don't know. It's hard. We're- We started in different places. We're still in different places."

(That's the truth.)

"We need to- I _want_ to- figure out how to get us in the same place."

(By me missing out on another two-hour time limit.)

"We have the blue box now. You wouldn't be losing out on-"

(My usefulness?)

"_No_! Would you just listen?" She couldn't tell if he was glaring at her, or just looking, and she sighed. "Sorry. I was going to say 'the ability that's part of your heritage,' actually. It seems like this whole thing is your inheritance so _no_, you should not give that up, period. But since you brought it up then yes, it also gives you another weapon in this war and I know you felt like you had to really justify your, well, usefulness without it before that alien interfered."

(Let's not get too mad at him under the circumstances.)

"I'm over it," Rachel said, so dryly that he had to laugh. "Seriously though. We keep trying to avoid this conversation because all the answers suck, but if we want to keep doing this- and I don't know about you, but I do-"

(You do know about me,) he pointed out.

"Will you quit interrupting?" But she smiled, and he couldn't take her exasperation personally when she tempered it with a hand on his crest, fingers flicking through the feathers. "Yes, I do have a pretty good idea of where you stand." Again that little half-smile. "It's just- there are three solutions to this, right?" She ticked them off on her free hand. "You morph human and get stuck. I morph red-tail and get stuck. Either way, one of us grabs onto the blue box so we keep our morphing abilities, but it's a lifestyle change, to say the least."

(I wouldn't-)

"_Or_ we accept that Romeo and Juliet had nothing on us and stay as we are, but-" Rachel's voice cracked. "I- you know how I feel about you. You know. You know because I tell you. But I- I want to show you, too, and the ways these bodies interact and fit together is-"

(What do you mean?) he asked, not breathing.

"I mean- I want to kiss you, Tobias." She did, touching her lips to his beak. "But it isn't the same, is it? As- as what it could be. And I want to hold you, but that makes your hawk brain really uncomfortable, and I get that- and I want to be held, too, especially after a fight, I think I need that now, something to remind me of who I am besides the berserker, and I think you're the only one who remembers who that Rachel is but still accepts who this Rachel is now. And I need it to convince me I'm still alive and we got out okay, and- there are things we just can't do because our bodies don't fit together, and- not just those things, but-" She made an expansive gesture with the hand that wasn't between his wings, her face on fire. "I- I don't know what hawks do. Actually I do know, because I looked it up, and… Cassie is _the_ worst, this bird came in and I was the first person she called, and I have a female red-tail morph now. I just-"

(Look, you don't-)

She held up a hand. "I know I'm going on and on and I'll be done in a minute but I need to get this out or I'll never find a way to talk about it again, and I think it's a conversation we need to have."

(Okay.) He sidled closer, under her arm, ignoring the hawk's panic underneath his boy's brain; she curved one of the fingers that had been between his wings under his beak, resting against his chest.

"It's just," she went on determinedly. "We're young. But we might not get a chance to get much older. And I- I don't want to die, but I _really_ don't want to die without- without doing some things, and with unfinished business, and with regrets that I haven't done some of the things I want to do." She fell silent, finally.

(And I am one of those things you want to do,) Tobias said blandly.

Her lips quirked up. "Well, when you put it like that…"

He pulled his head out from under her hand. (Heads up, I'm morphing. You're right, we keep avoiding this conversation, and it's one we should have face to face. Also, where your hand was was really distracting.)

"Oh, so all I have to do to get you in two-legged form is talk about-"

He swatted her with his half-wing, half-arm, growing taller. (Are we trying to have a serious conversation-) His beak sucked itself into his face, forming a nose and splitting into lips. "-or aren't we?"

"I'm sorry. You're right. So, I want to be with you, and not just in the ways in which you, being a total boy no matter what shape you're in, are thinking." She tilted her head back to smirk at him. "I want a future with you, Tobias. I'm just trying to picture what it's going to look like."

Tobias's feathers faded into his skin and he settled himself into a wedge of ground between the tree roots and slid an arm over her shoulders. He was quiet for a moment, composing his thoughts. "You're right," he said finally. "There's no easy answer, and all the answers suck. Because 'lifestyle change' is an understatement, isn't it? I stay human and I have nowhere to live, and you turn hawk and you give up so, so much- and you lose your family, and none of those things are acceptable, so while that morph brings up some really interesting possibilities for once all this is over…"

Rachel snorted, squeezing the hand he'd draped around her shoulders.

He took a deep breath, looking away from her across the meadow at nothing in particular. "It's like you said. We might not be getting much older. And if you live and I don't, you can't be a bird. So if you were seriously considering that as an option, don't."

"So that's strong evidence in favor of the Romeo and Juliet solution," she said quietly.

"But only for now," he said, and she twisted under his arm to look at him in surprise. He looked down to meet her eyes. "It's true. If we win, it's a different story."

"Only sort of."

"Not really. You have done an admirable job of _not_ mentioning the average lifespan of a red-tailed hawk these days, and I really appreciate that. But if you think _I_ want to die in twenty years or less, ballpark- We might die in twenty days or even twenty hours, but twenty years still seems awfully short. Especially if we win. Because- because if we win we'll have options. _I'll_ have options. That don't involve living in a meadow. That _do_ involve being with you."

"Are you- do you mean that? I mean, I've been… pushy. Worse than that. About this whole issue. And that wasn't fair, or right, and I'm sorry. So don't think you have to-"

"I mean it. If we actually win this, lots of things could be different, and that's one of them."

Rachel leaned her head against his shoulder. "I'm not going to pretend I didn't want to hear that."

"I know."

"We still have to get through the war first."

"Yeah. And who knows, by the time this is all over we might be on the Andalite home planet or somewhere even weirder."

"I look forward to meeting the other side of your family," Rachel teased.

"Yeah. So that's my take on it. We needed to talk about it, but I don't think we can make any decisions about it now. I think we have to stick with the way things are to start with. Until the war's over."

"Until the war's over," she echoed. "And then…"

"And then…" Tobias took a deep breath. "Assuming that you still want to have me around…"

Her hand clenched around his. "Don't _even_ go there. I'm not your aunt or your uncle or any of those jerks who don't deserve you and I am going to stay _right here._"

He pulled her closer. "You can't know that."

"_I know that._"

He smiled, the expression foreign on his solemn face. "So. When the war's over. We should talk about this again."

"And until then?"

Tobias shifted so that he could wrap both his arms around Rachel, pulling her close and hooking his chin over her shoulder. He could smell her pomegranate conditioner, even more than the blood still spattering her clothes. "Until then, you said you needed a hug."

Rachel gripped his body so tightly he felt breathless for a moment, then relaxed, breathing out. "Yeah. Yeah, I did. We made it through another one and we're still here."

"Still alive."

"And we're going to win this."

"Yeah. Yeah, Rachel, we're going to win this. And after…"

"Things will be different," Rachel said.

He echoed her. "When all this is over, things are going to be different."


End file.
